By Denise Balkissoon
Life isn’t easy for the residents of the Partridge Crop Reserve.
The chief is in Las Vegas — again. The band is in receivership — again. The welfare cheques are coming tomorrow, and until then smoking means picking butts out of ashtrays, eating means sardines on mouldy bread, and Melvin is sniffing gasoline to escape it all — again.
Then the cheques don’t come.
And the audience is laughing its head off.
Awarded the 1997 Governor General’s Award for Drama, fareWel tells the story of life as a native Canadian from the viewpoint of someone who’s been there. The play is currently being staged at Centretown’s Great Canadian Theatre Company, running until Nov. 14.
Written by Ian Ross, a Manitoban of Saulteaux and Métis heritage, fareWel uses humour to introduce the audience to the realities of reserve life.
“(Humour) disarms people,” says Ross. “If people are interested and engaged, you can do a lot with them.”
One of Ross’s goals is to provide a realistic portrayal of Canada’s native peoples. He says mainstream Canada’s opinion of aboriginal peoples and their issues is often coloured by persistent stereotypes.
“The message of this play is to help see native people as human beings,” he says. “Not seeing us as a stereotype or a media image, a bum on the street or the holy person in the woods. Those extremes exist, but the truth is somewhere in the middle.”
As a native person, Ross says experience is one way of getting at the truth. While he doesn’t want to limit what artists can choose as their subjects, he does say his own life experiences allow for a greater reality in his story.
“Let’s say I was going to write a play about 18th century Italy,” he offers as an example. “What do I know about that culture or that time? Nothing. Maybe I’d write a play where everyone was going around ‘Hey paisan, how’s it goin’?’ It would just come off as ridiculous. . .people would laugh and say how stupid it was. Yet when that happens with aboriginal people, it’s accepted.”
Maurice Switzer, the Assembly of First Nations’ communication director, says mainstream Canadians, including the media, “have not had adequate education about aboriginal history, aboriginal culture, aboriginal traditions.”
Switzer says a lack of native Canadians working in the media contributes to this problem.
“If newsrooms don’t reflect the faces of the population, your news coverage tends not to reflect reality either,” he says.
Switzer is in the process of designing a media monitoring project centred around aboriginal issues. The project will be directed at students, teaching them to monitor news coverage for bias, and should result in a regular publication highlighting good and bad examples of Canadian journalism dealing with native issues.
Working with professors in journalism programs at Carleton and Simon Fraser universities, as well as three aboriginal media programs across the country, he hopes to have it started by early next year. Based partially on similar efforts made by the Canadian Jewish Congress, Switzer aims to develop a model that can be shared with other ethnic minority organizations.
“We don’t just want to complain,” Switzer says.“We want to be part of the solution.”
Ed Bianchi of the Aboriginal Rights Coalition, a church-based lobby group made up of mostly non-native activists, says Switzer’s project is a positive step in addressing issues of negative representation. A Canadian of Italian heritage, Bianchi says non-aboriginals also have a part to play in helping overcome stereotypes.
“As a non-aboriginal person, one of the benefits I have is being able to communicate better with my non-aboriginal constituents,” Bianchi says. “We straddle both sides of the fence. What we’re trying to do is get information across both ways.”
As for Ross, his medium of choice is drama, which he hopes will touch people in a positive way.
“Theatre has this amazing power —the immediacy, the ability to draw you in and really grab you that no other art form can do,” Ross says. “(I hope) fareWel is able to do that to some people, make them rethink things a bit, even open up a little bit of understanding.”